Kendra Fanconi is a theatre director, producer, writer, and performer of new theatrical works. She has received multiple awards for her innovative, community-based, and often site-specific productions which have been created for, and performed in locations as diverse as elevators, trees, and swimming pools. In 2010 she won the Vancouver’s Critic’s Choice Award for her production of NiX, Canada’s first theatre of snow and ice.

It is Kendra’s dedication to and vision for arts-based leadership in the climate movement that also makes her makes her an outstanding artist.  In 2005 she co-founded The Only Animal (with Eric Rhys Miller) a theatre company whose sole mandate is to bring awareness and solutions to the climate crisis through arts-led practices. She has devised countless community-engaged and site-specific performance works to address issues of climate change, and for which her company has received multiple awards. Her work and collaborations are always inventive and highly imaginative; whether by using the crafts of puppetry, or by recycling plastic for costumes, to staging a bicycle ballet, a kayak stampede, or a cruise ship conga line.

Her profound commitment to addressing climate change also involves her advocacy work with the David Suzuki Foundation, where she leads the Artist Brigade – an initiative that focuses on storytelling as a vehicle for climate action. She has also been a keynote speaker on issues of climate change for the 2019 Climate Narratives conference at Simon Fraser University, as well as the 2020 National Arts Centre’s Greenroom conversations.